November 1, 2013 AT 1:00 pm

From the Forums: Despicable Me Minion Costumes #electronichalloween

Forum member eagleeye2e made these adorable costumes for Halloween this year and we love that they used our tutorials in such a cool way. This is definitely a good project to learn for next year’s Halloween!

I thought I’d share the results of my recent project where I made Despicable Me Minion Halloween costumes for my kids. This project was inspired by the trinket powered goggles tutorial in the Adafruit Learning System. In addition to the goggles, I wanted the kids to have Minion sounds that they could trigger so I used an Adafruit wave shield with an MP3 speaker and a tactile switch. The wave shield/arduino uno/battery pack combo and the MP3 speaker fit in the hooded sweatshirt pocket and I ran some speaker wire up to and down the inside of an arm sleeve for the tactile switch which was safety-pinned to the cuff. The costumes have already generated a lot of praise as well as questions from friends and family.

Thank you Adafruit for the great products and tutorials!

Here’s a photo of the finished goggles:

And a video of the kids showing them off:

Featured Adafruit Products!

Adafruit Wave Shield for Arduino Kit – v1.1: Adding quality audio to an electronic project is surprisingly difficult. Here is a shield for Arduinos that solves this problem. It can play up to 22KHz, 12bit uncompressed audio files of any length. It’s low cost, available as an easy-to-make kit. It has an onboard DAC, filter and op-amp for high quality output. Audio files are read off of an SD/MMC card, which are available at nearly any store. Volume can be controlled with the onboard thumbwheel potentiometer.Read More.

NeoPixel Ring – 16 x WS2812 5050 RGB LED with Integrated Drivers: Round and round and round they go! 16 ultra bright smart LED NeoPixels are arranged in a circle with 1.75″ (44.5mm) outer diameter. The rings are ‘chainable’ – connect the output pin of one to the input pin of another. Use only one microcontroller pin to control as many as you can chain together! Each LED is addressable as the driver chip is inside the LED. Each one has ~18mA constant current drive so the color will be very consistent even if the voltage varies, and no external choke resistors are required making the design slim. Power the whole thing with 5VDC (4-7V works) and you’re ready to rock.Read More.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN! WRAPUP EDITION! Each weekday this past month we brought you ideas and projects for an Electronic Halloween! Expect wearables, hacks & mods, costumes and more here on the Adafruit blog! Working on a costume project? Find ideas here and share your project with us on Google+, in the comments below, the Adafruit forums, Facebook, or Twitter– we’d love to see what you’re up to and share it with the world (tag your posts #ElectronicHalloween). Tune in to our live shows, Wearable Electronics with Becky Stern and Ask an Engineer, where Adafruit store discount codes are announced– get the most bang for your costuming buck!